


Something That Endures

by Sailorhathor



Category: Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Spoilers, Yuletide, Yuletide 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:14:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21829561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sailorhathor/pseuds/Sailorhathor
Summary: That was no normal hole in the ground. That was the grave he dug for her.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Something That Endures

**Author's Note:**

  * For [melmillo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melmillo/gifts).



_Bunny Lake is a Five_

No one understood why Ann Lake was crying.

It was her daughter's birthday, after all. What mother felt like crying at her child's fifth birthday?

Most of the mothers had thought Ann was strange, truth be told. A bit odd. One or two of them thought it was cruel to gossip about her troubles, but the rest of them gossiped like they did about everyone and their husbands, or the husbands they didn't have. Didn't something absolutely bizarre happen with Ann about a year ago? Something involving family?

Ann had managed to make one friend, one very good friend, Patsy, who also had a child at the Little People's Garden school. Another mother who had no husband and who seemed to understand most of what she had gone through in the last eleven months since Steven's breakdown. Or maybe she didn't fully understand, but she listened and nodded quite well.

Sometimes, Ann had breakdowns of her own, especially after a night of bad dreams. She would babble about Steven, who Patsy learned was her brother, wrapping a black tie around his hand. "He was going to... He planned to... How could he ever think of using it on Bunny? In my nightmare, he starts to... He wraps the tie around her neck, and I'm trapped on the other side of the door; it's locked, you see... And Stevie, he... he... I can't stop him. I keep hitting the glass in the window with a brick, but it refuses to break. I keep screaming for him to stop, but he won't, and... Why do I keep dreaming this? That's not how it turned out, right? Bunny is fine." Then Ann would laugh at herself and Patsy would help her dry her tears and freshen up her face.

The dreams about the tie happened a lot more than the ones about Bunny lying in a freshly dug grave next to her burned toys. Patsy really didn't understand that one. Maybe one day, Ann would open up and explain what had happened during Steven Lake's breakdown that brought on these nightmares. Patsy knew it had something to do with that.

Now, Ann was crying, and the other mothers and their children were staring and whispering to each other. Bunny had just blown out the candles on her cake. Patsy stepped up, placing an arm around her shoulders.

"Ann, what's the matter? Are you alright?"

Ann tried to get control of her outburst. "I'm sorry, everyone must think I've lost my mind."

"Why are you crying? Bunny's just turning five, she's not getting married," Patsy joked.

It worked; Ann did laugh. Her tears were already calming down. "You don't understand. Almost a year ago, I wasn't sure she would make it to her fifth birthday. My brother, he..."

This was always the point where Ann stopped. Something her brother had done was so unspeakable that Ann literally couldn't speak it. The nightmare implied things that Patsy simply couldn't believe, and now this... "Ann, what did your brother do?"

Ann looked at her with surprise. "You may be the only person in this country who didn't see that article in the tabloid if you really don't know." She stared at the tissue in her hand.

There was an article in a tabloid? "What did he do, try to kill her?"

The look on Ann's face...

"Mommy?" Bunny was pulling at her shirt hem. "Why are you sad?"

Picking her up, Ann gave her daughter a kiss. "I'm not sad. Come on, let's cut the cake."

Patsy was left gawking, her eyes and mouth open wide, over the implications of what Ann _hadn't_ just said. Steven tried to _kill_ his niece?

_Bunny Lake is Forgetting_

For a long time, Bunny asked for her uncle Steve, especially at bedtime. Steven had always been the one to tell her a bedtime story, after Mommy gave her a bath. Ann got the hang of it quickly, except for the part where Bunny wanted her to do a different voice for each character in the book. Steven had apparently been very good at that part.

"No, Mommy, you're not doing it right," Bunny declared the first time Ann read her her story.

"I'm not? Well what could I be doing wrong? I'm reading the story. I'm showing you all the pictures." Ann feigned frustration. "What else do you want?"

"Uncle Steve," Bunny said. Her little face drooped into a frown. "I want Uncle Steve to read the story."

Ann's face fell too, and she looked down at the story book, unsure what to say. "Bunny, your uncle, he... he had to go away for a while," she began. "He's ill. He'll be spending some time in the hospital."

Bunny was still too young to completely understand; someday, though, Ann would have to tell her. If she didn't, Bunny would find out some other way that would be less kind. Spending some time in the hospital, though, Bunny could understand that. "What's the matter with him?" the little girl asked.

"It's his brain," Ann replied. She struggled with how she should say this, not wanting to scare Bunny, but needing to let her know that her uncle was not coming back for a very long time. "It's sick. He needs the doctor's help to try to get better so he won't do anything silly."

"Being silly isn't so bad," protested Bunny. "I'm silly sometimes."

"Yes, but Uncle Steve was being silly all the time. So he had to be put away." Lifting the book, Ann prepared to begin reading again, but thought of something else to add. "It's only temporary, though."

"How long until he can come home?" Bunny questioned. "When will his brain stop being silly?"

Ann didn't have an answer for that. She would likely never know when it would be safe to let Stevie come home again. "I don't know, honey. The doctors say it's too soon to know."

Although it seemed strange for the child to smile at such a time, Bunny did, and said, "He needs to come home soon! I want to see what happens next to the invisible girl."

"The invisible girl?"

"Uncle Steve sometimes didn't read from books. He made up stories about the invisible girl named Bunny too, and she had grand adventures. Not even her mother could see her, though. That part was sad."

Eventually, Bunny stopped asking when Uncle Steve was coming home.

_Bunny Lake is Growing Up_

Somehow, Ann kept the truth from Bunny until she was fourteen. Until Bunny Lake no longer existed.

"Mother, I'm too old for you to be calling me _Bunny_ anymore," she said one day, shortly after she became a young lady. "I mean, are you serious? Bunny? It may have been cute when I was five, but I'm practically a woman now. Didn't you give me an actual name at some point in my life?"

There were times when that little smartass attitude lit up every bad nerve in Ann's body, and other times when she loved to see her daughter show so much spirit - it would serve her well in life when the world tried to drag her down as it had tried to drag Ann down so many times over the years. "Of course I did. You know your given name is Felicia."

"Well! Thank goodness for small favors." Bunny... _Felicia_... sucked on the lollipop she should probably be too old for too. "Would you mind ever so much calling me Felicia from now on? I can't have my school mates hearing you call me a baby name like Bunny."

"Of course, dear. I'm sure if they heard me, you would just die."

What Ann didn't know is Felicia had a reason to be so self-conscious at school lately. A group of girls had been bullying her, whispering about her and laughing as she passed them in the hall, in the classroom, in the line to get on the buses to head home. When Felicia couldn't take anymore and snapped, "What? What the hell are you laughing at?" the girls told her nothing, and went on giggling behind their hands.

Shortly after Bunny decided she wanted to be Felicia, a new girl joined the group of Bunny Kickers, a very mean girl, one who was secretly jealous of Felicia's pretty blonde hair and curvy body. She had no problem saying things that were shocking and mean to get a reaction out of her friends and send the receiver of those comments running from the room, usually crying.

No matter how hard she had tried to keep her nickname secret from the other students, they still found out. "Hey Bunny," the mean girl said, drawing out _Bunny_ like it was the best secret she'd ever heard. The other girls snickered. "Have you seen the news?"

"I can't hear you," Felicia said, trying not to wince when she realized they'd found out about her nickname. "Because that's not my name."

"It was once," the girl replied. She would not be daunted by a signature Felicia Lake Smartass Comeback. "I asked you, did you see the news... about you?"

Felicia couldn't help but walk right into this one. The comment was too strange and she too curious. "About me? What are you on about?"

The mean girl with the face of a snake took a rolled up magazine out of her back pocket and opened it up. The other girls gasped. "She's really going to do it," one of them exclaimed in a hushed voice.

This sent a chill up Felicia's back, for reasons she didn't understand yet. "What's going on?" she asked, highly suspicious.

"Don't you know?" Snake Face showed her the magazine. It was an old dog-earred gossip rag from ten years ago, and Felicia spotted something about the Lake family and a quote from Steven Lake. Wait, wasn't that the name of her uncle, the one she hadn't seen in so long she barely remembered him? "Your family was in the news when you first came here."

"Yank," another girl whispered. More giggles.

Being called any of a hundred variations of an American no longer hurt Felicia; she had heard it so many times, who even cared anymore? But this, this was something wholly new and shocking. "What the hell is that?" Felicia tried to snatch the magazine out of her hand.

Snake Face smoothly maneuvered it out of her grasp at the last second. "It's an article about how your uncle tried to wipe you from existence. When you were four." The smile on her face dripped venom. "When he tried to kill you."

The other girls gasped again, much louder this time. Some snickered like they had never heard something so shocking and juicy, others stared at Snake Face with wide eyes and a hand covering their mouths, disbelieving that the meanest girl among them had gone that far. Thinking that maybe she had gone too far.

Many things that Felicia had heard over the years, things she dreamed, things her mother had dreamed that made her wake up screaming, they began to come together like a puzzle that solved itself. This time, Snake Face let her snatch the magazine out of her hand, enjoying how distressed and stunned Felicia looked.

She read the words on the cover. _American Attempts to Murder His Niece! "My sister and I don't need anyone else!" declares Steven Lake._

The nightmare of the burned toys. A deep hole with all her things in it. Clothes, dolls, toys.

That was no normal hole in the ground.

Felicia couldn't be here anymore. She turned and ran from the school.

That was the grave he dug for her.

Ann came home to find her daughter curled up in her closet, weeping as if a beloved relative had died. "You should have told me," Felicia wept. "At least then, I could have been prepared for when the girls at school found out."

Ann leaned against the wall and sunk down to the floor, where she sat next to her child, the only family she had left. "Most of them already knew, love. They just couldn't say it to your face."

"I want to see him," said Felicia.

At first, Ann didn't realize who her daughter was talking about. "Who? You want to see - " The look on her face was a mixture of shocked and panicked. "Oh Bun - Felicia, I don't know..."

"He tried to kill me, Mother. He tried to wipe me out of existence." Felicia blew her nose into a tissue. Ann began to stroke her hair. "I need to tell him that I'm not going anywhere."

It took some time for Ann to allow this. Part of the reason that she did was because the doctors had explained Steven's condition to her, that he was now not a threat to her daughter. Steven would probably not be a threat to anyone again, and would live out the rest of his life in the institution he had been in since Bunny was four.

Catatonic schizophrenia. That's what they called his current condition. It took him years of violent outbursts and delusions, even hallucinations, to get to this level of insanity, but he was there now, achieving a level of stillness Ann had never seen from him, ever. Steven had always been a very energetic go-getter who got things done. He always took care of everything for her. Now, she took care of things because she had to, for her child.

Steven would sit, usually, sit and not move for hours. He hardly spoke. During these times of unsettling stillness, if someone posed him, he would hold that position so long it would make Ann's arms hurt to watch it. Sometimes she wondered if he was still in there.

"Your brother has moved through multiple types of schizophrenia over his years here," one of the doctors said. "This may be the last phase. He hasn't spoken in two months."

 _Two months!_ "You don't think he'll ever recover?"

"Ms. Lake... He's spent a decade in here." The doctor cleaned his glasses on a handkerchief. "This latest phase is his complete withdrawal from the world."

Ann insisted on staying with Felicia during her... What did they call this? A visit?

Steven stared off into space and didn't acknowledge their arrival. Sitting there, a vacant look upon his face.

"Steven? Stevie? Look who I've brought. You probably don't recognize her. The last picture I showed you was taken five years ago, and you didn't have a good reaction, so... Anyway, this is Bunny. Can you believe our little girl has grown into this beauty?... Steven?"

Felicia sat in a chair in front of him. Would he even hear her? She waved a hand before his face.

"Felicia, don't do that."

The teen saw a very small, almost imperceptible movement of his eyes as he focused more on her. She smirked. He would hear her.

"Hi Uncle Steve. It's been a long time, huh? But I just had to come see you. See, for a long time, I didn't understand what happened that night when all my toys and clothes were lying in a hole, burned up, and you gave me the special milk that made me sleepy. Recently, though, everything came together." Felicia leaned forward, a little closer to him. Ann took hold of her shoulders to keep her from getting any closer. "I don't know how much of this is mental illness and how much of it is your choice, but maybe this was something you chose to go through with and you didn't have to. You could have loved me and been a very important part of my life, but instead, you tried..."

Tears attempted to overcome her. Felicia held them back. "You tried to erase my existence and end my life, and just bury all evidence of my presence on this Earth in a grave in the back yard. Did you really think my mother would go through with it? Did you think it would be that easy? If you did, then you really are crazy."

Squeezing her daughter's shoulders, Ann cautioned, "Maybe you shouldn't say things that could anger him."

"He's not going to make a move, are you Uncle Steve? No. He's given up. He knows now that my mother is never going to go along with his plan to get rid of me. You know what, Uncle Steve? I'm not going anywhere. I'm not invisible. I always existed and I always will, until I outlast you by decades. Because you're just a shell now. You have checked out, haven't you? Because you've finally been able to admit to yourself that Felicia Bunny Lake is here, and you're the one who no longer exists."

Steven suddenly moved on his own. He turned toward his sister and niece and positioned his arms in the same way he had that night, when he was wrapping the tie around his hand. Wrapping an invisible tie around his hand now, he said, "You did wrong, Annie. You forgot about me."

For a long few seconds, Ann was right back there to that night and Bunny wasn't safe, her life was in danger, _Oh God, he's going to strangle Bunny to death! His niece! He's gone mad! Stark raving mad!_ Ann screamed, pulling Felicia and the chair back several feet, away from her homicidal brother.

By the time the doctors and nurses had rushed in, Steven had already stopped moving again. Staring off into space.

Until that moment, Ann had actually held out hope that her brother would someday recover, and they could all be a family again.

Silly brain.

_Bunny Lake is Getting Married_

"Now, this is an event where it's quite appropriate for you to cry," Patsy informed Ann as she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.

That old joke between them... Ann laughed lightly through her tears. "Yes, very appropriate. My little Bunny is getting married."

Felicia stood before a mirror in her wedding dress. The ceremony would begin in ten minutes. "Oh, Mom... I really did pick a great dress. It's just beautiful." She turned to show her mother for the one hundredth time, beaming with excitement and the glow of perfect happiness.

Putting an arm around Felicia's shoulders, Ann kissed her on the cheek. "Most of that beauty isn't coming from the dress, but the gorgeous being inside it."

Felicia giggled. "I love you, Mom."

"I love you too, my Bunny."

Years ago, if you had asked Ann who would walk Bunny down the aisle, she would have said Steven. Instead, it turned out to be Felicia's stepfather.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from a quote by Oscar Wilde about existence.
> 
> I wanted to note that I know mental illness doesn't really work the way the characters in the story talk about it. It is the way many people think of it, though (that the afflicted has full control over whether or not they are "crazy.")


End file.
